Life and learning in an uncertain world | Helen Whitehead

Tag Archives: e-moderating

I find myself somewhat sceptical about the value of user profiles and of so-called communities based around individuals: a social network in fact. Joining a social network and setting up your user profile often gets you nowhere – you know nobody and you cannot communicate with anyone because you have

Once a month I like to look back on what I was blogging about this time last year and in previous years. It often prompts reflection on how things have – or have not – changed and where I have moved on to. In July 2009 I was looking at

This blog used to be called Periodic Fable – which I thought was a very clever name for a blog from a writer who’s also a science graduate. I still think it’s a great name, but it doesn’t cover what I write about, which is e-learning and online communities, with

Back in November 2009 I wrote about the planning necessary for a successful webinar and suggested that one of the most important thing to do before a webinar is to test and test again – the software, your equipment and the speakers’ equipment. If possible all attendees equipment should be

Now that Ning has announced that it is phasing out free services, it’s time to take another look at our Ning communities and to establish what might be a reasonable alternative to Ning. For my longest-running Ning network, ELESIG, we are prepared: a hard-working group from this community of practice

Sometimes I am accused of being a pessimist: I always treat technology, especially wonderful new inventions, services and applications, with a healthy pinch of salt. So I laughed a bit hollowly to read that Ning are phasing out their free social networks (as well as reducing the number of their

I had quite a busy week of webinars last week, running a successful webinar on E-portfolios for the ELESIG community at elesig.ning.com. I also attended two fascinating webinars, one on bidding for European funding from the Digital Communications Knowledge Transfer Network and one on Digitisation at the British Library, from the

Andy Roberts recently posted an excellent comment on his blog about how not to use online communities. It’s well worth a read. His point is that you can’t just pop into a community and use it like a noticeboard, once – especially not for what is essentially an advert. (“You’ll

We’ve been setting up some online spaces to support action learning sets for groups of businesspeople. These groups have some face to face meetings and the online space is to support these. In such cases we don’t need strictly defined e-tivities. Action learning is defined by the participants themselves. The

A new e-moderating course for practising teachers and tutors in FE starts today and another (for academic staff in HE) is into its second week starting tomorrow. In both cases it is about experiencing e-learning as a student as well as developing practical skills for online teachers. I am always